Category: Uncategorized
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The co-production confusion
The word co-production is used a lot around me. However, the situation is quite confusing. Upstairs, in the public policy corridor, it is used in one way; downstairs, in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) corridor, it’s used in another way. So I set out to get to the bottom of this confusion. But of…
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Genes, microbes, us
Jon Turney has just published a fascinating new book about the microbiome and microbiomics entitled I, Superorganism: Learning to love your inner ecosystem. This blog post is a collection of thoughts provoked by this book; it’s not a book review. Coincidentally, Jon’s 1998 book Frankenstein’s Footsteps was my gateway into the social and cultural study…
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Mundane Consequences of the Unintended
This is a GUEST POST by Richard Helliwell, a PhD student at the Institute for Science and Society. How can responsible research and innovation frameworks deal with mundane consequences, consequences that although minor add perhaps imperceptibly to the load of daily frustrations and annoyances that emerge through our interactions with various technologies and services. The…
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Making sociology public
This is a GUEST POST by MARK CARRIGAN. He is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick and a Digital Fellow at the Sociological Review. You can find more information about him at the end of this post. Ever since I began to study Sociology, I’ve been fascinated…
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A cut too far? The ritual slaughter debate in Britain
The World Food Summit, in 1996, agreed a definition of food security that included the requirement that food met the food preferences of communities. Indeed, it is evident that food preferences reflect aspects of culture including religious identity. Where food preferences include the consumption of animals, debates about animal welfare also arise which can come…
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Science, politics and science communication
I sometimes get asked why I write blog posts about science communication and even sometimes practice science communication, given that science communication is not really the focus of our ‘Making Science Public’ programme of research (which was drafted in response to a Leverhulme Trust call for proposals on ‘science and politics’). Despite its title, the…
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Science communication and ‘vulgarisation scientifique’: Do words matter?
A Spanish colleague and friend recently sent me a Portuguese caricature about ‘science communication’ with the following title: “Como a maioria do jornais divulga ciência” (How the majority of newspapers disseminate science). I’ll only translate the first two panels, as the third one is a bit coarse: Scientist: We have destroyed 10% of cancerous cells…
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Making science public: A compilation of blog posts – 2014
It is time again for my end of year blog of blog posts. Unbelievably, this is already the third time I am doing this. How time flies! Strange — so far we haven’t had a post about time! This is quite surprising, as otherwise we have had posts about more or less everything under the…
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Making synthetic biology public: The case of XNAs and XNAzymes
On 1 December a group of scientists at the University of Cambridge led by Dr Philipp Holliger published an article in the journal Nature in which they presented new findings within the field of synthetic biology. Both the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), who funded the research,…
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Will a spoonful of ‘awareness’ help the medicine go down?
Lord Robert Winston, well-known scientist and professor of fertility studies, would like the public to be made aware that experiments on animals are involved in the development of all medicines, vaccines, and drugs for human use. To this end, he introduced the Medicinal Labelling Bill in October 2013 which, if passed, would make it mandatory…
Making Science Public 